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January 30, 2018

What We Believe as Wedding Photographers

What We Believe

So it’s honesty hour over here on the MRP blog today. What we believe as wedding photographers is directly tied to our experiences as we went through our own wedding planning process. I have in the past briefly written about how our wedding photographer backed out on us a month before our wedding but I never really dove into how that shaped the company I know own. In fact, if that hadn’t happened, I doubt I would be a wedding photographer today.

How We Felt

As someone in her twenties, I was excited to get married and share a life with Jason. I was also thrilled at the idea of having our day documented in a way that reflected our love for each other. I didn’t want some cheesy 80’s poses. I wanted images that were natural and authentic. At the time, I had just finished my art degree and was teaching so the budget was a bit small. I knew a few photographers from school and we decided to reach out to a few whose style I liked. Unfortunately, that is where my research stopped. We ended up booking someone whose work I loved but who turned out to be incredibly unprofessional. A month before the wedding she let me know that she had a scheduling conflict and would not be able to be there. I was heartbroken. As someone who loves imagery and visual storytelling, this was the worst wedding nightmare I could think of. Because it was the summer, everyone else we knew was booked.

A Friend to the Rescue

One of my sweet sorority sisters happened to have a pretty good eye as a film photographer and facing down the idea of not having any images, I asked if she would help us out. That one request has launched a lifelong friendship as well as both of our careers as photographers. The fact that she was willing to serve us made a whole world of difference in my stress level on that day. As a woman who walked through a 15 month deployment her first year into marriage, those images turned out to be so incredibly precious to me in some of the scariest times in our marriage where I feared for his safety and missed him terribly.

How that Shaped Us Now

That one act of a photographer backing out of our wedding day and creating stress shaped our belief that in every way we interact with our couples and their families, we seek to create a calming experience, atmosphere, and wedding day. The ability for my friend to step into serve us despite it being one of her first weddings meant the world to me. She provided a relief to the stress I had been feeling by coming along side us and serving.

We believe that we are called into photography to serve our brides in a way that insulates them from the chaos that weddings can bring while providing them an experience they can’t find elsewhere so that on their wedding day they can simply savor the beauty of the vows they are exchanging. In so doing this we help tell the story of not only their day but provide heirlooms, treasures that will hang on their walls and sit atop dressers in their homes for years to come, serving as a reminder of the promises they exchanged.